Back in my day… 😉
My aunt used to scribble Kilroy everywhere. My mom did too. I was always seeing this little face and head with a huge nose peering over a wall everywhere.
Have you ever seen him?
“Kilroy wuz Here” would usually be scrawled somewhere in the picture.
I had to ask… What’s up with the little guy? Though my memory is not really clear, I believe my mom told me he had something to do with the Vietnam War and that he was an old cartoon named Kilroy. That’s all I knew about him.
Looking back I realize that I too had Kilroy doodled on all my notebooks, Chucks, and book bags… I too had picked up the Kilroy cause whatever it may be.
I had long forgotten about Kilroy until about two or three days ago.
Out of the blue, I thought of Kilroy. I asked my significant other whether he remembered him or not, he said he vaguely recollected something like that… he wasn’t sure.
I decided to look up the history of The Kilroy and see what it actually means anyway and what I found was incredibly interesting to me. Especially since I randomly thought of him during these current and bizarre moments of human history we are all experiencing.
Turns out Kilroy does have something to do with war. As an ambiguous message of memorium, Kilroy has popped up in different cultural forms amongst soldiers across the globe.
According to Wikipedia, Kilroy has been found everywhere American GI’s were during WWII and beyond. The curious little tombstone appeared on captured American military equipment, leading Hitler to think he had some external spy to deal with named Kilroy… Stalin worried about Kilroy…
I like to think that in those times of immense loneliness, while facing death and unknown enemies on foreign shores, that Kilroy was a way of memorial.
Remember me. Remember us. Remember that though it all is shit, we still have this little guy for all the world to remember us by.
Kilroy was here.
We were here.
Kilroy will stand as a neutral beacon for us all.
Read more on Kilroy and possible creator here